CNCF Survey: Cloud Usage in Asia Has Grown 135% Since March 2018

Home / CNCF Survey: Cloud Usage in Asia Has Grown 135% Since March 2018

The bi-annual CNCF survey takes a pulse of the community to better understand the adoption of cloud native technologies. This is the second time CNCF has conducted its cloud native survey in Mandarin to better gauge how Asian companies are adopting open source and cloud native technologies. The previous Mandarin survey was published in March 2018. This post also makes comparisons to the most recent North American / European version of this survey from August 2018.

Key Takeaways

Usage of public and private clouds in Asia has grown 135% since March 2018, while on-premise has dropped 48%.

Usage of nearly all container management tools in Asia has grown, with commercial off-the-shelf solutions up 58% overall, and home-grown solutions up 690%. Kubernetes has grown 11%.

The number of Kubernetes clusters in production is increasing. Organizations in Asia running 1-5 production clusters decreased 37%, while respondents running 11-50 clusters increased 154%.

Use of serverless technology in Asia has spiked 100% with 29% of respondents using installable software and 21% using a hosted platform.

300 people responded to the Chinese version with 83% being from Asia, compared to 187 respondents from our March 2018 survey.

CNCF has a total of 42 members across China, Japan, and South Korea including 4 platinum members: Alibaba Cloud, Fujitsu, Huawei, and JD.com. A number of these members are also end users, including:

Growth of Containers

Container usage is becoming prevalent in all phases of the development cycle. There has been a significant jump in the use of containers for testing, up to 42% from 24% in March 2018 with an additional 27% of respondents citing future plans. There has also been an increase in use of containers for Proof of Concept (14% up from 8%).

As the usage of containers becomes more prevalent across all phases of development, the use of container management tools is growing. Since March 2018, there has been a significant jump in the usage of nearly all container management tools.

Usage of Kubernetes has grown 11% since March 2018. Other tools have also grown:

Amazon ECS: up to 22% from 13%

CAPS: up to 13% from 1%

Cloud Foundry: up to 20% from 1%

Docker Swarm: up to 27% from 16%

Shell Scripts: up to 14% from 5%

There are also two new tools that were not cited in the March 2018 survey. 16% of respondents are using Mesos and an additional 8% are using Nomad for container management.

Commercial off-the-shelf solutions (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, etc.) have grown 58% overall, while home-grown management (Shell Scripts and CAPS) have grown 690%, showing that home-grown solutions are still widely popular in Asia while North American and European markets moved away from those in favor of COTS solutions.

Cloud vs. On-Premise

While on-premise solutions are widely used in the North American and European markets (64%), that number seems to be declining for the Asian market. Only 31% of respondents reported using on-premise solutions in this survey, compared to 60% in March 2018. Cloud usage is growing with 43% of respondents using private clouds (up from 24%) and 51% using public clouds (up from 16%).

Kubernetes

As for where Kubernetes is being run, Alibaba still remains No. 1 with 38% of respondents reporting usage, but is down from 52% in March 2018. Following Alibaba, is Amazon Web Services (AWS) with 24% of respondents citing usage, slightly down from 26%.

The decline of on-premise usage is also evident in these responses, with 24% of respondents reporting that they run Kubernetes on-prem compared to 38% in March 2018. OpenStack usage has also declined significantly, down to 9% from 26% in March 2018.

For organizations running Kubernetes, the number of production clusters is also increasing. Respondents running 1-5 production clusters decreased 37%, while respondents running 11-50 clusters increased 154%. Still, respondents are mostly running 6-10 production containers, with 29% reporting that number.

We also asked respondents about the tools they are using to manage various aspects of their applications:

Packaging

The most popular method of packaging Kubernetes applications is Managed Kubernetes Offerings (37%), followed by Ksonnet (27%) and Helm (24%).

Autoscaling

Respondents are primarily using autoscaling for Task and Queue processing applications (44%) and Java Applications (44%). This is followed by stateless applications (33%) and stateful databases (29%).

The top reasons respondents aren’t using Kubernetes autoscaling capabilities are because they are using a third party autoscaling solution (32%), were not aware these capabilities existed (30%), or have built their own solution to autoscale (26%).

Cloud Native Projects

What are the benefits of cloud native projects in production? Respondents cited the top four reasons as:

Improved Availability (47%)

Improved Scalability (46%)

Cloud Portability (45%)

Improved Developer Productivity (45%)

Compared to the North American and European markets, improved availability and developer productivity are more important in the Asian market, while faster deployment time is less important (only 38% cited this compared to 50% in the English version of this survey).

As for the cloud native projects that are being used in production and evaluated:

Many cloud native projects have grown in production usage since March 2018. Projects with the largest spike in production usage are: gRPC (22% up from 13%), Fluentd (11% up from 7%), Linkerd (11% up from 7%), OpenTracing (27% from 20%).

The number of respondents evaluating cloud native projects also grew with: gRPC (20% up from 11%), OpenTracing (27% up from 18%), and Zipkin (12% up from 9%).

Challenges Ahead

As cloud native technologies continue to be adopted, especially into production, there are still challenges to address. The top challenges respondents are facing are:

Lack of training (46%)

Difficulty in choosing an orchestration solution (30%)

Complexity (28%)

Finding vendor support (28%)

Monitoring (25%)

One interesting note is that many of the challenges have significantly declined since our previous survey in March 2018 as more resources are added to address these concerns. A new challenge that has come up is lack of training. While CNCF has invested heavily in Kubernetes training over the past year, including courses and certification for Kubernetes Administrators and Application Developers, we are still actively working to make translated versions of the courses and certifications available and more easily accessible in Asia. CNCF is also working with a global network of Kubernetes Training Partners to expand these resources, as well as Kubernetes Certified Service Providers to help support organizations with the complexity of embarking on their cloud native journey.

Serverless

The use of serverless technology has spiked with 50% of organizations using the technology compared to 25% in March 2018. Of that 50%, 29% are using installable software and 21% are using a hosted platform. An additional 17% plan to use the technology within the next 12-18 months.

For installable serverless platforms, Apache OpenWhisk is the most popular with 11% of respondents citing usage. This is followed by Dispatch (6%), FN (5%) and OpenFaaS, Kubeless, and Fission tied at 4%.

For hosted serverless platforms, AWS Lambda is the most popular with 11% of respondents citing usage. This is followed by Azure Functions (8%), and Alibaba Cloud Compute Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and Cloudflare Functions tied at 7%.

Serverless usage in Asia is higher than what we saw in North American and European markets where 38% of organizations were using serverless technology. Hosted platforms (32%) were also much more popular compared to installable software (6%), whereas in Asia both options are more evenly used. There is also much more variety in the solutions used, whereas AWS Lambda and Kubeless were the clear leaders in North America and Europe.

Relating back to CNCF projects, a small percentage of respondents are now evaluating (3%) or using CloudEvents in production (2%). CloudEvents is an effort organized by CNCF’s Serverless Working Group to create a specification for describing event data in a common way.

Cloud Native is Growing in China

As cloud native continues to grow in China, the methods for learning about these technologies becomes increasingly important. Here are the top ways respondents are learning about cloud native technologies:

Documentation

50% of respondents are learning through documentation.Each CNCF project hosts extensive documentation on their websites, which can be found here. Kubernetes, in particular, is currently working on translating their documentation and website across multiple languages including Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and Chinese.

29% of respondents are learning through technical webinars. CNCF runs a weekly webinar series that takes place every Tuesday from 10am-11am PT. You can see the upcoming schedule and view recordings and slides of previous webinars.

The Cloud Native Community in China

As cloud native continues to grow in Asia, CNCF is excited to be hosting the first annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Shanghai this week. With over 1,500 attendees at the inaugural event, we look forward to seeing the continued growth of cloud native technologies at a global scale.

To keep up with the latest news and projects, join us at one of the 22 cloud native Meetups across Asia. We hope to see you at one of our upcoming Meetups!

The pool of respondents represented a variety of company sizes with the majority being in the 50-499 employee range (48%). As for job function, respondents identified mostly as Developers (22%), Development Manager (15%), and IT Managers (12%).

Respondents represented 31 different industries, the largest being software (13%) and financial services (11%).

This survey was conducted in Mandarin. You can view additional demographics breakdowns below: